Someone recently asked me advice concerning a 4th grade daughter who has a negative attitude towards math, on top of the fact that she struggles with it. This mother said she always focused on reading and comprehension (which the daughter does well), but felt she didn't focus enough on her child's math. This girl has convinced herself that she doesn't like math and that she is not good at math. Mom desperately wants to change her way of thinking!

The girl had done placement tests or the end-of-year tests for grades 1, 2, and 3, and those showed some inconsistencies... for example, she did much better on the money section for 2nd grade than for 1st. Some really EASY questions (like 6 - 2 and other subtraction facts) from 1st grade were answered wrong. The 2nd grade test was about 60%, and 3rd grade showed that she didn't try most of the questions.

I asked her to redo 4 problems from the 1st grade End of Year test... and she got them almost all correct, which meant she passed the 1st grade test just fine.

Changing a student's attitude towards math is definitely possible, with the right kind of instruction and experiences.

This made me wonder what is going on... I suspected the girl purposefully didn't put forth the effort to try to get the problems correct, which caused the test results to not fully show what she actually knows.

Changing a student's attitude towards math is definitely possible, with the right kind of instruction and experiences. There is a FREE online course tailored to CHANGE students' attitudes towards math; this is what I suggested to this mother that her daughter take.

Main concepts to learn in this course:

• Knocking Down the Myths About Math
• Math and Mindset
• Mistakes and Speed
• Number Flexibility, Mathematical Reasoning, and Connections
• Number Patterns and Representations
• Math in Life, Nature and Work